Burnout Crash! a pinball game hidden inside a driving game

Burnout Crash! isn’t a driving game. It may have cars. It may have roads. But at its core, Criterion’s first DLC project is a pinball game in the guise of unmitigated vehicular destruction. It’s also a title that’s been a long time coming.

It originally began on the Wii and the driving force behind the idea was that players could draw their own tracks, but Criterion said it wasn’t as fun as they expected. The studio discovered that the real fun came from the impact in intersections. They went from a game that was all about user-generated content and turned it into one that was more level-based and inspired by old-school pinball.

KINECT COMPATIBLE: I got a sense of that during my quick hands-on time using the Kinect this month. I picked one of several vehicles (Takedown 4×4 for me) and selected one of 18 stages (I picked a crossing near an Area 51-type military base.). Soon, I was ready to go. When comparing it to pinball, think of it this way: The driving aspect is the build-up, it’s like pulling back on the knob that launches the pinball up the ramp. The car already moves at full speed and players use their hands on an imaginary steering wheel (It’s the Kinect.) to pick the best spot to plow their car into.

Once that happens, the car enters what Burnout fans know as “Crash Mode,” where they can influence the movement of the vehicle post-crash, causing mayhem and destruction. The car ricochets the same way a pinball would off other vehicles and buildings all the while I was scoring points, which registered as the cost of wreckage.

EXPLOSIONS! On the Kinect, I moved my Takedown 4×4 by jumping up and immediately leaning or walking around the play area upon landing. The vehicle bounces around in the direction I moved. The one limiting factor on this is that players can only jump when the Crashbreaker meter is full. How quickly it regenerates is dependent on the apocalyptic mayhem players cause. The more havoc you wreak, the faster it refills.

The experience bouncing back and forth between firetrucks and buildings reminds me of hitting pinball bumpers or the rubber rings on the board. The one difference is that there’s some strategic element in how players create wrecks. They want to hit vehicles in parts of the intersection that disrupts flow of traffic, increasing their score.

But what puts the game over the top and fully into the pinball realm is the constant bonuses and game-changing elements that pop up on the playfield. In the initial 90 seconds that players have to destroy the intersection, they’ll get time bonuses for hitting certain objects, scoring bonuses for hitting gold cars. Mashing into a pizza truck causes a Wheel of Fortune style minigame to pop up, and using the Kinect, players spin it for random power-ups.

PINBALL INSPIRATIONS: Once they hit certain skill- or score-based milestones, the level evolves as parts of pinball machine would if you hit certain objects and such. There may be a sink hole that pops up, and players have to avoid that. (Think of it as the gap between the flippers.) Or there maybe a tsunami that washes away the wrecks you caused, essentially reseting the playfield. There’s even sections of the game where players aren’t allowed to let vehicles through the intersections otherwise they fail.

Throughout the level, there’s constant audio feedback for players. The Voice Over injects some humor, offers hints and introduces playfield-changing scenarios. In addition, there’s a certain “hitting-the-jackpot clatter” to every action. It reminds me of Las Vegas casino. With some much going, you’d expect it to by confusing, but it all works.

Certainly, this isn’t the DLC experience that everyone was expecting from Criterion, but if you take Burnout Crash! for what it is — a pinball game — it’s clever, an update with a twist.

Like all of Criterion’s games now, there is Autolog support. This time it’s all about breaking each other’s high scores. As for the structure, there are six themed worlds with three levels each. In the main campaign called the Roadtrip, players start off in the country and move to zones such as a ritzy neighborhood, a beach, a military base and a harbor. There are also other modes that let players explore the intersections more freely.

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